How long ago had the funeral been? Was it eight years ago? Alice and Malachy, all of the family, occupied the Beforeland: where I lived before Belinda’s death and Stefan’s incarceration, where I once looked down on a welter of messy tragedies that only befell other people. I hadn’t talked to any of the Hodges since Belinda’s death. Too much shame. Too much of the same shame.

“I remember now. Rebecca, I hope my son Stefan can help.”

“Oh, I hope so, too,” she said. “It’s about Alzy... I killed her.”

For a moment, my back burst with electrical prickles, because I thought we were about to hear a criminal confession.

Then Stefan said, “Becky, you know that isn’t true. You didn’t...” But he stopped, respectful. He knew all about magical thinking.

“Tell us,” I said.

Stefan thinned his eyes at me: Becky’s letter of remorse had already been written, the file prepared.

“I’m sorry, Stefan. I want to know about the night Alzy died. This matters to me in a personal way.”

“But you do know.”

“I don’t know the details.”

Why had I never wanted to know, to know everything, before? She had been my friend. We’d once been as close as cousins. Now, I recognized that I probably never wanted to know everything about my friend Alzy’s death. At first, it seemed too far from my own reality in life. Now, it probably seemed too close.

“Do you think it’s your karma or something?” Stefan asked.

I noticed that Rebecca, whom I’d met formally only five minutes before, was looking at both of us like she needed to be closer to the nearest exit.

“I don’t believe in karma, but it’s something,” I told Stefan.

“You guys, it’s really okay!” Becky said. “I don’t mind telling you. It’s not an imposition. It will probably help me along this road, if anything.”

Stefan suppressed a sigh, and so did I. They were different kinds of sighs.

So Becky began with the start of her relationship with Alzy.

She answered an ad.

As a new college grad, she answered a lot of them.

But one was particularly intriguing. Intelligent Resourceful Companion, read the headline. The ideal candidate would work for a young professor who had been sick in the hospital for a while. Those words raised an alarm.

“It was the combination of the word young and the word hospital. I thought, what kind of hospital would a young person be in? The mental kind? But then, I thought, who cares? So what if it was? Did it really matter if the young professor wasn’t homicidal? I looked up clinical depression. I looked up schizophrenia. I looked up bipolar illness. I had no idea what any of it meant. I studied English and library science! I needed a job.”